Capitalism – market economy – free enterprise – these
are the jewels in the crown of civilization which, since the renaissance,
have brought unprecedented wealth, prosperity and freedom to large parts
of the world. Capitalism has struggled and eventually triumphed over its
historical adversaries; in earlier times, popes and kings and in our time
socialism and communism. In the 21st century, since the collapse
of the Berlin Wall, international corporate capitalism is bursting, like
fireworks, in triumph; merging, globalizing and buying governments.
What puny opposition remains is easily dispatched with a broad range of
powerful weapons which have been developed over the years. Today
the only real threat to capitalism is capitalism!

Socialists may practice socialism and Christians may practice
Christianity but if by capitalism we mean a competitive market driven economic
system, then capitalists do not practice capitalism. Theorists notwithstanding,
capitalism is not an ideology, it is merely a description. Capitalists
are not trying to implement some philosophy, they are only trying to make
a buck any way they can. To a capitalist the biggest enemy
is not socialism or labor unions or liberals or environmentalists, or even
big government, the biggest enemy is risk. Risk of not making money.
Risk of losing money.

Making money and avoiding risk in doing so is what capitalism
is all about. But it is precisely in the risk taking that society
draws its benefits from capitalism. That is the dilemma. Risk
promotes wise investment resulting in efficiency, innovation and the creation
of wealth, not just for the capitalist but for society as a whole. But
a lot of capitalists fall by the wayside in the process. It is in
the capitalist’s interest to eliminate risk and society’s interest to prevent
them from doing so. The way to avoid risk is to control the market
and to do that they must also control the government. This struggle has
been going on for hundreds of years: capitalists forming monopolies, oligarchies
and trusts and society breaking them up.

So long as society can keep pace with all the tricks and turns
that capitalists take to avoid risk, the world would continue to reap the
blessings of capitalism. But for the capitalists to succeed in eliminating
risk, they would have to eliminate competition resulting in a monopoly
of corporations with as much efficiency and innovation as any government
bureaucracy. The ultimate risk-free climax would be monopoly and
oligarchy and the corporate-run government necessary to keep it that
way — functionally indistinguishable from a Mafia run state or a Stalinist
one. Capitalism, instead of an engine which pumps wealth to society and
makes some capitalist wealthy in the process, would become an engine
which sucks the wealth out of society, making a handful wealthy by impoverishing
the rest.

We see this process going on in third world countries today and
we are seeing the beginnings of it at home, in America. All three
branches of government are increasingly under the control of corporations.
Both political parties are addicted to corporate financing. Mergers,
acquisitions and globalization, all techniques for eliminating risk, are
rampant. The media is being merged and taken over by corporations and increasingly
being used as public relations outlets for the corporations.

Right now society is not keeping pace. The tricks and turns
that corporate capitalists use to avoid risk have gotten trickier and twistier.
Just as a mosquito injects an anesthetic so that you will not feel it is
sucking your blood, corporations are coopting the very processes by which
people recognize what is going on so that more and more we are living in
a virtual reality without realizing it. Sort of like a Potemkin village
or like the movie The Truman Story where a boy is born and raised on a
television set without knowing it. And as corporations merge and
grow larger, they have even bigger budgets to build even more elaborate
and convincing “sets”. But this is not science fiction. The
“sets” are being built around us as you read this.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of the Center for Media &
Democracy have been documenting this process for years. Their publications
include a quarterly newsletter, PR Watch, and several books including:
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations
Industry, Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, and
now Trust Us, We're Experts*. While flippant and amusing, these books
and articles tell a very chilling story of corporate public relations manipulation
and spin control growing exponentially in size, audacity and sophistication.

The “father of public relations”, Rampton and Stauber point out in Trust
Us, is Edward L. Bernays, son in law and disciple of Sigmund Freud. By
following Bernays’ philosophy one can see the road map to the future.
Here are some of his ideas [pp 42 - 44]:

scientific manipulation of public opinion is necessary to overcome chaos
and conflict in society

In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or
business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated
by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental
processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires
which control the public mind.

while most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought,
there exist an intelligent few who have been charged with the responsibility
of contemplating and influencing the tide of history

public relations is an applied science, like engineering, through which
society's leaders could bring order out of chaos

being herd like also made people remarkably susceptible to leadership.

Of course that “leadership” can only be exercised by those who can afford
the price of the Hill & Knowltons and APCOs of this world.

Here are some cases of virtual reality cited in their latest book.
Big contributions, free junkets and the promise of future jobs are the
more obvious ways of corrupting legislators but less obvious and more subtle
is the use of public relations to actually manipulate the “facts”.
A typical example of how this works is illustrated on page 14.

“In the Fall of 1997, Georgetown University's Credit
Research Center issued a study which concluded that many debtors are using
bankruptcy as an excuse to wriggle out of their obligations to creditors.
Lobbyists for bank and credit card companies seized on the study as they
lobbied Congress for changes in federal law that would make it harder for
consumers to file for bankruptcy relief. Former U.S. Treasury
Secretary Lloyd Bentsen cited the study in a Washington Times opinion column,
offering Georgetown’s academic imprimatur as evidence of the need for ‘bankruptcy
reform’. What Bentsen failed to mention was that the Credit
Research Center is funded in its entirety by credit card companies,
banks, retailers, and others in the credit industry. The study itself was
produced with a $100,000 grant from Visa USA and MasterCard International
Inc. Bentsen also failed to mention that he himself had been hired
to work as a credit-industry lobbyist.”

Coopting and distorting the very sources of knowledge and information
which informed people, legislators, scientists, government officials,
the press, etc. rely on as being objective and scientific is one of the
most clever and the most egregious techniques for creating virtual reality.
As an EPA employee I have seen many examples of self-serving corporate
sponsored “scientific” studies being foisted off on EPA and used to justify
weak ineffective regulations or no regulations at all. The fraud,
if discovered at all, is rarely discovered by EPA. In the absence
of high level support there is very little incentive for science bureaucrats
to look closely at studies with powerful backers.

From p. 199: If you want to know just how craven some scientists can
be, the archives of the tobacco industry offer a treasure trove of examples.
Thanks to whistle-blowers and lawsuits, millions of pages of once-secret
industry documents have become public and are freely available over the
Internet. In 1998, for example, documents came to light regarding an industry-
sponsored campaign in the early 1990s to plant sympathetic letters and
articles in influential medical journals. Tobacco companies had secretly
paid 13 scientists a total of $156,000 simply to write a few letters to
influential medical journals. One biostatistician, Nathan Mantel of American
University in Washington, received $10,000 for writing a single, eight-paragraph
letter that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Cancer researcher Gio Batta Cori received $20,137 for writing four letters
and an opinion piece to the Lancet, the Journal of the National Cancer
Institute, and the Wall Street Journal – nice work if you can get it, especially
since the scientists didn't even have to write the letters themselves.
Two tobacco-industry law firms were available to do the actual drafting
and editing. All the scientists really had to do was sign their names at
the bottom.”

If the virtual reality created by public relation firms were only
limited to selling toothpaste and deodorant we might not get too concerned
about it. Falsifying medical research to defend harmful and dangerous
products is a troublesome escalation. But there appears to be no
limits to the uses of PR and no concern by the users of its ultimate impact.
The issue of global warming, which could possibly plunge humanity into
a new dark age, is being surrounded by the fog of virtual reality by the
practitioners of PR as if the stakes were no more important than the selling
of mouthwash.

Rampton and Stauber point out in pp 267-288 of Trust Us that PR firms
hired by the major industrial emitters of greenhouse gasses have created
dozens of influential sounding front organization such as “The Advancement
of Sound Science Coalition”, “The Global Climate Information Project”,
“The Information Council for the Environment” and “The Greening Earth Society”
which have saturated the media, Congress and the public with industry spin
so as to make their case by sheer volume and noise. Since the facts
and the scientific community are so overwhelming against them, the object
of the public relations onslaught has been to slow down, confuse and defuse
public clamor for resolute action. Friends of the Earth International
calls this “lobbying for lethargy”. There is legitimate scientific debate
about the source and rate of global warming and a lot of the spin addresses
that, but a lot doesn’t. Some of the dirtier tricks played are:

An attempt to stimulate anti Kyoto Treaty email to President Clinton by
promising to enter writers’ names in a $1000 sweepstakes drawing.

Appealing to anti-abortion activists with the claim that “Al Gore has said
abortion should be used to reduce global warming.”